


Barrow Wight

by PrettyArbitrary



Series: On the Naming of Things [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, And then they have adventures, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Fairy Tales, Fairy!Sherlock, Gen, M/M, The Power of Names, no I mean he's sidhe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2017-11-05 13:26:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re a myth!” John snaps, then growls because <i>no,</i> that’s not what he meant.  He feels like he’s losing the plot.  “Fairies are a myth.   <i>You’re</i> mad.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, written for a [prompt on the kink meme.](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/18842.html?thread=114060186#t114060186)
> 
> Keep an eye on the ratings and tags. This story is evolving in many ways, so things could change as I go.

The Cambrian Mountains are beautiful, a little wild still in the middle of a land settled so densely and for so long.

John came out here with Bill’s birding group, on Bill’s insistence in a change in scenery from that box where he sleeps in London. The shotgun feels comfortable in his arms, but John’s never been much for shooting anything that wasn’t shooting back. 

The landscape, now—that’s called to him since the moment he arrived.

It’s not like Afghanistan’s raw deserts and mountains, but there’s something similarly echoing and haunted about the Welsh countryside. John knows It’s a flight of whimsy, but also it’s as close as he’s come to any kind of danger or excitement since he set foot back in the UK. Which is why he begged off a third day of rough shooting with the lads this morning, in favour of a day-hike.

When she found out he was going, the owner of their bed & breakfast threw together a rucksack for him, equipped with a bottle of water, a bag lunch fit for three men, an emergency fleece, a torch and a coil of light rope. “You never know,” she told him when he asked if that wasn’t a touch gratuitous, and then she hung a rosary around his neck.

That was _definitely_ gratuitous, but it would’ve been rude to say so. He thanked her, slipped it into his pocket, and set off, provisioned for about three days in the wilderness and possibly the zombie apocalypse.

The hills are beautiful, old and patient under humanity’s feet. It’s not something John expected to find here, this desert-like sense of lonely peace. But the valleys are even better. They feel hidden, wrapped in on themselves with an air of guarded secrets. He feels like an interloper in the valleys, and that feels pleasantly risky. So he follows the streams and dirt bike paths through the low places, enjoying the burn of his muscles and looking for trouble.

It’s a lark, and he knows it, but when he clambers down over a rocky outcropping to come face to face with the mouth of a barrow, it still gives him a little thrill.

It’s half-exposed, the front stones in the front sticking up out of the eroded earth in a snaggle-toothed granite smile. It reminds John of a leathery old Afghani man who’d insisted that the Djinn whispered men’s futures to him when the wind blew. He’d said he could predict who would live and die under John’s hands. John had never asked for names.

He sets his pack down and fishes out the torch, then hops over a couple of intervening stones to crouch and angle the light into the opening.

It’s surprisingly dark. He’d expected caved-in dirt, actually, but it seems to go back a ways.

He sits back on his heels and considers the issue. The light is getting long, but he’s got over an hour before dark, and it’s not as though John’s really that far from town.

The opening isn’t very big, but then neither is he. 

John ignores the pop of his knees when he stands and returns to the pack to fetch out the rope—probably needless, but just in case. He wedges the pack tight between a couple of the stones, to thwart any animals tempted to explore his zombie-apocalypse provisions.

Torch in hand and rope looped over one shoulder, he peers back down into the barrow mouth. This is stupid. It’s ridiculous, and it’s probably dangerous; not even in the exciting way, but probably in the ‘get wedged between rocks and die a humiliating death’ way. The most thrilling thing he can possibly find is some bits of bone that’ve been dead for two thousand years. He’ll probably find rocks and spiders, and maybe a badger. It’ll probably bite him. He might pick up an infection.

He swings one foot in, feeling for the ground—lower than the earth outside—and then ducks in.

No spiders. A lot of dirt. No immediate badgers, which is all to the good. The stone plinths that prop up the mound of the barrow glint in the beam of his torch. He follows their rise up to the broad capstone, about six inches above his head. He raises a hand to drag it across the underside. 

He’s touching a human structure that’s thousands of years old. He grins to himself. “All right, that’s a bit nifty.”

It takes two turns about the little room to realize that the zone of pitch black at the back isn’t a shadow. It’s another opening, further back into the mound. The thing must be made of a whole series of these little chambers. Little as he remembers from the historical documentaries he used to watch with his grandmother, that sounds right.

Of course, she was an old Scotslady, and along with watching shows about Britain’s archaeological history, she told him all sorts of things about barrows and what lives in them. And then he read _Lord of the Rings_ and… He chuckles quietly to himself. No force on earth can stop him from investigating to see if the next chamber holds barrow wights.

He edges through the narrow opening, and of course the next chamber doesn’t have barrow wights. It doesn’t have much of anything, except for an oval ring of stones in the floor that he supposes is probably an ancient grave. John steps forward and kneels at the edge so that he can sweep his hand over the earth. It’s compacted almost as hard as rock. If anything’s in there, he’d need more than he has on him to dig it out.

The idea feels disrespectful, and besides, if there’s anything of historical value in here that someone hasn’t already turned up, then that’s a job better left to experts. John’s speciality lies in putting live bodies back together.

He stands, torch clamped between his teeth so he can brush his knees off, then whips around at a faint scuff behind him.

And staggers a step or two backwards in shock, because there is a tall, living shadow standing next to the door. It flinches and puts a hand up when the torch beam catches it in the face, proving that it is in fact a living man.

“Jesus! I’m so sorry,” John stammers, pressing a hand to his chest. His heart is skipping a million miles a minute. “Am I trespassing?” 

The newcomer flicks what might be a smile at him. With the torch pointed less obnoxiously off to the side, John can barely make him out; he’s standing in a dark hole in the ground, wearing a long dark coat, and his hair is a slightly inkier smear around the pale smudge of his face. “Somewhat, yes. But it’s all right, I don’t mind.” His voice is deep and rich, filling the little space with its timbre.

John takes a few deep breaths, getting himself back under control. “I’m sorry, honestly. I just…I saw the…” He waves a hand vaguely upward. “And…well, curiosity, you know.”

“Yes.” The man smiles again. “I’m familiar with the phenomenon.”

“Right.” John nods uncertainly. “Right. Um. So, you too? I mean…is this a thing you do? Coming here.” Because the man looks comfortable here, as if this place is too familiar to bother spending energy on looking around. His eyes, faint glints of reflected light, are fixed firmly on John. Which is quite understandable, under the circumstances, so John’s not sure why it should make him so nervous. “Um. That is, if I lived near a place like this, I’d probably do too.” God, he sounds like a babbling moron.

At least it seems to amuse his companion. John can hear suppressed laughter in his voice. “I do, yes. I come here often. It gets so _boring,_ you know, after a while. Day in and day out of the same thing, over and over. Even finding ways to relieve the tedium gets boring eventually. This place, though…it’s almost another world.”

By the end, the man’s voice has trailed off till he’s almost mumbling to himself. John finds himself nodding along in agreement to the absent mutter. “I know the feeling. I miss…”  
No, wait, what is he doing? Why would he unload war stories on a total stranger, or whinge about life in London since he got back? He gets it, that’s all that matters.

The man nods anyway, as though he’d heard John’s thoughts. The pale blur of his face tilts, eyes glittering intermittently in the low light as he studies John. They must be bright, to catch so little light so readily. It’s so quiet down here that when he prepares to speak, John can hear him inhale. “I’ve long wished I could take a little bit of that world back with me.”

The idea has a contagious wonder to it. What must they have been like, the people who built this place? What did they wear? What did they think? What rites did they give their dead before leaving them behind in the dark? Tombs like this were built for warriors, right? What sorts of wars did they fight? For a flicker of a moment, John can feel a bond of brotherhood stretching back to those ancient men.

But then it’s gone and the ancient space is just a curious little burrow again, and John has to laugh at himself. “I think it’d lose its mystique, taken out of context.” Rocks and dirt and roots and…no bugs or vermin or any sign of animals, actually, that’s a little odd, isn’t it…?

“Do you? I don’t believe so.”

The warmth in the words plucks at John, something like affection or interest, and in the gloom, he feels it back. So they’re caught up in children’s fancies, but doesn’t the place beg for it? The sparks of the man’s eyes feel hot against his skin, and John finds himself wondering the same sorts of things about this man that he just did about the long-gone builders of the barrow.

“What’s your name?” the man asks suddenly, his voice low and vibrant.

“John Watson,” John answers. “What’s yours?”

The man smiles broadly rather than answering. His teeth gleam. “John Watson. I’m pleased to meet you.”

The syllables are sounded so carefully in that lovely voice, each given its proper attention; John’s never heard his name spoken so perfectly. It tugs at him down deep inside, like he’s just been spoken _to_ for the first time in his life. Like he’s never heard his own name before. The man’s eyes are so bright in the torch’s cast-off light that they almost seem to glow, the colour of moonlight.

The stranger, suddenly, strikes him as unspeakably beautiful, crafted of moonlight and shadow and teased into reality by the yellow-white halo of John’s torch.

“John Watson.” He repeats the name, turning the words over in his mouth as though tasting them. It feels like he’s tasting _John._ “You’re wounded.”

John jerks his gaze down. He hadn’t _noticed_ picking up any cuts or scrapes...

The man chuckles. It’s a breathtaking sound in this place. John instantly wants to hear it again. “You hold yourself like a soldier, John, but your hands say...healer. Curious. And your wounding,” a hand flaps out of the shadows like an albino bat, “that’s written all over you. You’ve been branded by war. That’s her way, you know, to mark the best and bravest and keep them for her own. I think you might be quite remarkable.”

John scrunches his face into a bewildered squint. Who are they talking about, now? He opens his mouth to ask, but the man cuts him off with a deep pull of air through his nose. Is he...sniffing? “At the foot of the Hindu Kush, wasn’t it. Dust and snow, a land just as ancient as this one. You’ve travelled a very long way and come home again, John, haven’t you? But war still won’t release her claim on you.”

John’s lips part, but he can’t find anything to say. That’s just... “Amazing.” He tries it again, louder, and yes, it is. “That’s amazing. How did you...” 

But...no, that’s not right, is it, it’s not _amazing,_ it’s... Creepy. Instinct digs warning fingers into John’s hindbrain. 

The claustrophobia of the space constricts around his shoulders, in this tiny underground room in the middle of nowhere with an attractive but very strange stranger between him and the door. John feels the first flush of danger rise, like a blush that steadies rather than shakes him, and meets the man’s eyes in the gloom. “It might be more comfortable to continue this conversation elsewhere.”

The man bounces on his toes, gleeful as a child who’s just received unexpected permission. “Would you like to?” He seems to be totally immune to the massive amounts of caution that John is now radiating.

Also he’s making no sense. John purses his lips, wondering whether he’s sharing space with a nutcase. “Would I like to what?”

“Go _elsewhere._ ”

What…? John opens his mouth on a sarcastic retort, then snaps it closed again. Sod this. He starts for the door. “I’m going ou-ow!”

He staggers back, more in confusion than pain. What the hell did he just trip on? It feels like the air just shoved him backwards. He catches his balance and starts forward again, and collides again with something he can’t see.

The man watches him grope at the air, trying to find the root or whatever it is that must be blending in with the dark. After a few seconds, he points down at John’s feet. John follows his gaze, but there’s nothing there but the stone circle.

“Do they not warn you about us anymore?” the man asks, sounding curious.

John’s head snaps up. “What?” Warn him? _Danger_ floods through him again, a lot closer to the fight-or-flight end of the spectrum this time. He doesn’t know how, but he can feel that stare digging into him again, scoring over his body and paring him down. 

“You don’t know, do you?” the man asks wonderingly after a moment of study. “You’re stood in a circle in a barrow, talking to me, and…your kind haven’t got any smarter over the years, have they?”

“ _Excuse_ me?” Obviously John can see what the man is getting at, but it’s lunatic. The fellow’s either a madman, or an arse who needs professional consultation on what constitutes functional humour. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on, but I am not about to stand here and be insulted-“

The man waves him silent. “Oh, don’t be like that. It’s not your fault evolution moves so slowly.” Blithely disregarding John’s open-mouthed incredulity, he steps forward till the toes of his shoes brush against the outside of the stone ring. He’s only inches away, looking down at John, but when John reaches up to push him back to a more reasonable distance, he can’t touch him. The palms of his hands flatten on empty space.

The man seems not even to notice, despite its impossibility. “John.” His name in that voice still puts a shiver down John’s spine. “I meant it. Would you like go elsewhere? I can take you. You’re bored. You’d find it marvellous.”

“You said you find it boring.” John leans forward to put his weight on his hands. Rather than falling forward on his face, his shoulders sway backwards at the force he exerts. He can’t decide whether to be alarmed or fascinated.

No, alarmed, definitely. Just, in a few minutes. He can see the man’s face clearly for the first time, and he’s…not gorgeous. _Striking._ Strange, exotic features; beautiful individually, but almost alien, taken as a whole.

Oh, but his eyes. It’s as though they’re the most incredible things John’s ever seen; he can’t look away from them. He can’t decide whether they’re really glowing or if it’s just the way they catch the light.

The man shrugs. “I do.” John has to scramble to remember what conversation they were having. “But it would be new for you. You’d find it magnificent, it’s like nothing you’ve ever known, beautiful and mad and dangerous. You like danger, don’t you? Yes, it’s written all over you. Oh, it _is,_ John, it’s ever so dangerous for someone like you. They’d eat you alive if you let them, but you wouldn’t, would you. You’d fight. You’d go right back at them. It would be _thrilling._ And _you’re_ quite interesting, John. You’re something different.”

While the man hurls words at him like handfuls of pebbles, John turns in a circle, dragging his fingers around the unbroken hard air of the circle. _How?_ He shakes his head and tries to catch up to the conversation. “How am I different? If you’re…what you’re implying, then I can hardly be anything new.” Of course he can’t be what he’s implying. That’s impossible. But looking into that remarkable face, it doesn’t feel all that impossible.

Being trapped by air in a stone ring should be impossible. He’s _trapped._ That...hadn’t quite sunk in till just now. His lungs lurch like a car at the start of a drag race.

“Ah!” The man snaps a bit straighter, a dog catching a scent trail. “So you _do_ know.“ One eyebrow goes up. “Rather stupid of you, then, wasn’t it? Coming down here.”

“You’re a myth!” John snaps, then growls because _no,_ that’s not what he meant. He feels like he’s losing the plot. “Fairies are a myth. _You’re_ mad.”

“Are you implying that myths aren’t real?” The man cocks his head. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“No!” John snarls, at the end of his rope. Whatever the fuck is going on here, _like hell_ he’s going to swan off with a man who’s holding him prisoner in an invisible jar. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you!”

“Ah.” The man takes a long step backwards, and sinks back to set his shoulders against the wall of the barrow. Even in the puddle of dark he’s retreated to, his silhouette’s gone stooped and sulky. “Well, then, conveniently for you, neither of us will be going anywhere.”

John gapes at him. And then punches the wall. Air. What the fuck ever.

And then curls over his hand, swearing, because bloody hell, did he just split a knuckle?

Once the pain dies down a little, John says, in a dangerously level voice, “Let me out.”

The man—fairy, ghost, barrow weight, whatever the buggering blazes—says nothing.

John places his hands against the air and leans slightly forward. His voice goes a few degrees more frigid. “Let me out.”

The man—thing—watches him.

His mind threatens to explode into incandescent rage, but that’s about the least productive and most ridiculous thing John can think of doing just now, so he holds it back and casts about for something— _anything_ else. Belatedly, the innkeeper comes to mind. John slips a hand into his pocket to find the rosary she gave him. 

The…man’s head lifts a little, interested, when John pulls it out.

He’s not sure what to do with it, exactly. Is he supposed to pray? He really doesn’t do God. These things are supposed to be blessed, though, right? He takes a swipe at the air with it; the loop of beads swings right through the plane of air that John can’t get through, but his knuckles still bump off it.

Well, what the hell. He spins it a few times to get up some speed and then lets fly at the stranger.

It bounces off his shoulder. He stoops to pick it up. “Oh, now _this_ is interesting. Atheist, are you? You need to buy into the message in order for this to work, you know.” He straightens and starts twirling the rosary in lazy loops, the bastard. “Atheist, though. That’s unusual. Must cause you some trouble with the authorities, mustn’t it?”

“What?” John’s brow furrows, so thrown by what the…oh hell, the _fairy_ is saying that it takes him a moment even to place it. “It’s 2011! Have you been living under a rock?”

Oh. Right.

The fairy looks upward pointedly. “You might say so, yes.” Then his eyes come back down, so avid that they light his face in the darkness. His voice is greedy. “You’re saying that it’s changed, though. Tell me. Or no! Wait, don’t. Let me work it out.”

John crosses his arms and leans one shoulder against the solid plane of air. “Why don’t you just go out and find out for yourself?”

“Because I can’t, _obviously._ ” John doesn’t need to be able to see the man to know that he’s just rolled his eyes. The sarcasm is deafening. “Remember all the bits about the _boring_ and the other world and the wishing for something different?”

John sighs. Right. He might’ve remembered, if he weren’t so busy being pissed off about being held prisoner in a sodding magic ring. “Let me out and I’ll tell you.”

“I just told you I don’t _want_ you to tell me!” the man snaps. “I’ll work it out for myself.”

John laughs a little bitterly, steps backwards, and sits down in the middle of the circle. “Right. You have fun with that, then. I take it the Catholics were still running things last time you were up top? Or maybe you’d got to Good Queen Bess? What’s the last year you remember, then?” He doesn’t try to keep the mocking edge out of his voice. 

The fairy steps forward slowly, then another, and kneels down opposite John. He looks enthralled. “It was the Year of Our Lord 1451.”

John laughs again. “Christ, no one even says that anymore. Bloody hell, you could live till the end of time and you’d never be able to guess how much the world’s changed since then. It’s developed another hemisphere, just for starters. And humanity learned how to make suns.”

The fairy actually _vibrates_ in place. Visibly breathless—fairies need to breathe, you learn something new every day—he leans forward on his hands, keeping his nose just that side of the stone ring. “ _You_ could let me out.”

“Me?” John squints at him dubiously. “Not me, mate. I’m stuck in a bloody stone ring.” He scoops up a few grains of dirt and throws them at the boundary. They arc right through to land on the other side. John curses.

“I can let you out of the ring,” the fairy tells him earnestly, straining as close to the edge of the ring as he can get without crossing it. What would John do, anyway? Play a savage game of ‘got your nose?’ “And you can let me out of the barrow. I can only go to my home from here. I can’t go to the human world unless someone who belongs to it gives me permission.”

John frowns dubiously. “And setting you loose on the modern world would cause what kind of havoc, exactly?”

The fairy makes a rude noise in the back of his throat. “I just want to see it! I’m _bored,_ John, I told you. You can’t fathom how bored! You can’t even _live_ long enough to get as bored as I am. Age after age of the same damned thing, the same tired faces nattering the same dried-up repetitive drivel and playing the same games over and over and over again! There’s _nothing_ for me there, John. I’d rather live in a hole in the ground a few feet from the human world!”

It’s John’s turn to stay silent and watch the other man.

“You, though!” the fairy keeps going, trying to convince him. “You mortals, you change. Your world changes! Coming and going, new faces with different ideas and no one living long enough to establish any kind of real continuity. It’s chaos! It’s _beautiful._ I don’t want to hurt it!” he insists, sounding almost desperate. “I just want to _be in it._ ”

John sits there a moment longer, hands on his knees, before he hauls himself up and crawls back over to the edge, nose to nose with the fairy. “You let me out, and then I let you out. And…then what? Where do you go? What do you do?”

The fairy smirks. “I won’t know that till I get there, will I?”

John pulls in a breath laden with ancient dirt and stale air, and wracks his brain for everything he can remember about fairies in the folklore. They make deals. They grant wishes. They have to keep their promises…but their promises are like contracts written by corporate lawyers. There’s always a loophole.

John crouches there, inches away from a bloody _fairy,_ and thinks harder than he’s ever thought in his life.

“Alright,” he says at last. “On one condition. I’m your supervisor. You can stay in the human world until I tell you to go.”

This close, the fairy’s grin is dazzling in the torchlight. “Agreed.” He all but leaps to his feet, holding his hand down to John across the barrier. “Come out, John Watson.”

That tone of command shakes down through John’s body and _seizes_ him by the name. He sways forward breathlessly before he catches up to himself and takes the fairy’s hand to be pulled up and across the circle.

The fairy is strong, his hand warm, bony and sinewy, and not appreciably different from a human hand—except that there’s a vibrancy under the skin that John can’t put a name to. Belatedly, John realizes he’s still hanging on, and hurriedly releases the fairy.

The fairy pulls his hand back more slowly, giving the impression that he wasn’t in any hurry to let go. John wonders what it feels like for him to hold a human’s hand.

“So.” He rubs uncomfortably at his mouth with the back of his hand. “What do I call you, then? I expect I need a name to invite you out with. And you…don’t really want to see what happens when you shout ‘hey fairy’ in public these days.”

The fairy grabs his arm and tugs him towards the door. “In a moment. Come on, John!” John lets himself be hauled out to the entrance.

A trickle of weak light is filtering through the barrow opening into the outer chamber. It shocks John. He feels like he’s been underground for years.

The fairy lets go of him at the doorway, turning so they face each other. “Name me.”

“What?” And John is lost again. Surely he must… “You have a name, don’t you?”

The fairy tosses his head. “I have a name among the aes sidhe. I don’t have one for the human world. I’m not real there unless you name me.”

“Oh.” John stares at him for a moment, willing that to make sense. He thinks he gets it. It’s very…storybook. “Alright. Well… Does it matter what I name you?”

The fairy jerks his head back like John just struck him across the face with his ignorance. “Of course it does! Names shape people. They mean who they are.” He glares down at John. “You people really have forgotten almost everything, haven’t you? By naming me, you define me for your world.”

The criticism doesn’t even register. John’s too busy gaping. “You want me to…Jesus!” _No pressure,_ as the Americans would say.

“No, oh, no, don’t name me _that._ ” And John can’t help but laugh at the prissy wrinkle of that aristocratic nose.

“Well, it’s a bit of a tall order you’re putting on me!” The very thought of _defining_ someone rankles. “What if I turn you into someone you hate?”

The fairy shakes his head so hard his hair flops, grabs John’s shoulders and starts turning him in circles—widdershins, John notes, and wonders if he needs to pay attention to that sort of thing from now on. “Don’t be an idiot! It’s not as though you’re giving birth to me. Just come up with something that seems appropriate. We can work with it.”

John struggles out of the fairy’s grasping hands, cuffing at them till he stops trying to ‘help,’ or whatever the hell he thinks inflicting John with motion sickness is supposed to accomplish. “Alright,” he says after a moment. “Alright. I think…right.” He peers hesitantly up at the fairy, feeling strangely shy, as though they’re about to consummate something. “So…there were these stories I liked as a boy.” They’d been fantastic stories, about a brilliant, strange, impossible bloke who’d had adventures. John first read them when he was young enough to believe the man was real, but later he’d known that was impossible. The real world was too drab to contain such a figure. But he’d always wished… “So…what do you think of the name Sherlock? Sherlock Holmes.”

The fairy cocks his head, clearly turning the name over in his mind. Then he smiles and bows John towards the exit with the stately manners of an older time.

John ducks and swings up and over the threshold, one foot still planted inside so he can stabilize his taller companion when he has to stoop, and extends his hand back towards the fairy. “Come out and meet the human world, then, Sherlock Holmes.”

The fairy takes his hand, bending almost double to clear the low jamb. When he straightens up again outside, he still looks the same, and yet it is Sherlock Holmes who is smiling raffishly down at him in the greying light of twilight, larger than life and, somehow, just as John always pictured him in his head. 

It reminds him of another thing his grandmother told him about fairies. “My gran said that names have power.”

“They do,” Sherlock agrees. There’s a teasing twist at the corners of his lips. “And now I have yours, and you have mine. I’ve known married couples who weren’t so intimate.”

Now there’s a strange thought. John’s not even sure, yet, what to make of that little thrill that goes through him every time Sherlock says his name.

He backs away a few steps to retrieve his rucksack, still tucked between the rocks where he left it. The torch and rope—just as useless as he’d expected—go back in, and then… 

Well, what the hell. In for a penny, in for a pound. He stands and walks back to Sherlock, rucksack slung over one shoulder. “It’s John Hamish Watson, actually.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrow with pleasure. John doesn’t pull back when he steps in to bend his head down till his fringe tickles at John’s nose. “I _knew_ you liked danger, John Hamish Watson,” he purrs. John gasps as his name, as he’s beginning to suspect it will always do when spoken by this man, trembles right through to the core of him. “I can see we’re going to be very glad indeed to know each other.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta shout-outs to [hiddenlacuna](http://archiveofourown.org/users/HiddenLacuna/pseuds/HiddenLacuna), [dee-light](http://archiveofourown.org/users/DraloreShimare/pseuds/dee-light), and [lapotter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LapOtter/pseuds/LapOtter)! I couldn't have done it without you, guys! (I mean it, I couldn't have.)
> 
> ‘Power point’ is British for ‘electrical outlet.’

It’s well after dark by the time they reach the edge of town. A half-moon is out, for all the dubious good it does; it doesn’t illuminate so much as it deepens the shadows over all the deadliest bits of landscape. One might think that wandering the moonlit Welsh countryside with a man who’s really a fairy would be atmospheric, but mostly it’s just painful. After nearly breaking his legs three times, John’s fished his torch out again, but Sherlock doesn’t seem to need it.

He breaks into a run before John can even make out what he’s seen, and then does a flying leap to land out in the middle of the road John hadn’t realized they’d reached.

Sherlock stomps his feet on the blacktop. “A road, John! Look at it!”

“I see it.” John slips a little on his way down the short bank, trying not to fall on his head while he keeps an eye out for headlamps. “Sherlock, I know for a fact they had roads when you were here last.”

Sherlock spins in place, trying to look in every direction at once. “Cars use roads. Where is a car, John? I want to see one!”

This is the creature of shadow and starlight that John met in a burial mound. For a moment, all he can think of is the time he ended up herding kiddies when he was invited to Christmas with Harry’s wife’s family. He sighs and follows warily as Sherlock sets off towards the warm yellow flickers of inhabited houses past the curve in the road. “How can you know what a car is, but never have seen one before?”

“Sherlock knows about cars. I think…” John squints at the phrasing, but Sherlock whirls on him before he can say anything, eyes sharp as an awl. “I think he even knows how to use one. _John._ I need to see a car right now!”

Tragically, there are three cars parked under a street lamp, up the street from them. Sherlock sprints. John growls, shakes off that little curl of sensation down his spine at the sound of his name, and gives chase.

Sherlock’s circling the first vehicle like a hunting hound by the time John reaches him. It’s a broken-in, pale green Ford Fiesta. John grabs him by the back of his collar when he reaches out. “Look, but do not touch.”

“I’m just going to-” Sherlock grabs for the door handle with his free hand—unlocked, bloody trusting small towns—and John physically heaves himself backward with his grip still on Sherlock’s coat to keep him from climbing in.

“ _Sherlock._ ” John stresses his name deliberately, hoping that whatever that strange thrill is he feels when Sherlock says his name, it works both ways. At any rate, Sherlock stops and turns to face him. He has the nerve to look as surprised as if John hadn’t already told him off once. John has a suspicion that they’re going to have to work on concepts of ‘just because you want it doesn’t mean you can have it.’ “Cars are expensive. Interfering with a car that doesn’t belong to us will get us in trouble. Maybe worse, it’ll get us attention we don’t want.”

Sherlock studies him for about two seconds, as if trying to intuit a foreign language, then focuses upwards past John’s head. “And what is _that?_ ”

God, he’s like a ferret. John follows his gaze, flexing backwards to look up and back. “Power lines?” He looks back down to find Sherlock’s gaze apparently striving to lever the information from John’s brain. “Look. Leave the car alone and come with me, and I’ll tell you about electricity.”

The bid works, and thank God because John was short on ideas for herding an unwilling Sherlock the several blocks to the bed & breakfast. John points out street lights, telephone poles, and woos Sherlock onwards with the promise of the miracles of television. Sherlock is vibrating in his skin by the time they reach the place.

John breathes another sigh of relief to note that there’s no one in the sitting room when they come in. He holds the front door open and waves Sherlock up the stairs. Smuggling him in for the night is probably easiest, and then…Christ…they can catch the train back to London tomorrow morning.

One step at a time. He suspects he’ll be living by that mantra for a while.

John detours just long enough to drop the rucksack off in the kitchen, and then follows Sherlock upstairs to unlock the door. There’s one double bed; a bit crowded for two grown men, but they can manage sharing. He turns to Sherlock as a thought strikes him.

“Do you sleep?”

Sherlock blinks, looks thoughtful, and then says with as much scorn as if he hadn’t just needed to review it for himself, “Of course I sleep. I am human.”

“Right.” John nods, not sure whether to be relieved or miffed. “Good. So I don’t need to teach you how to brush your teeth or use the loo or anything?” Please, no.

Sherlock scoffs, turns with haughty grace, and sails into the bathroom. John closes the door on him when he starts to unfasten his trousers.

Once he’s in his pyjamas and ensconced in fluffy blankets, though, John can’t bring himself to roll over and stop watching the bathroom door. He’s not used to people prowling around his rooms, much less near-total strangers. Who aren’t even human. And who’re inexplicably difficult to look away from. John jams the pillow a bit tighter under his head.

It’s twilight at the edge of the forest. John stands under the shadow of the trees, and watches the meadow glow with a universe of fireflies flickering in the purple fog.

He can feel the forest’s eyes on him. It’s waiting to find out whether he’ll step out into the ghostly meadow, or back in under the cool cloak of the trees; pondering whether he’s something to devour or something to toy with. He feels it as a twisting thrill in the pit of his stomach. He wants to try his hand against the forest, but he’s caught at the verge, can’t quite pull free from the hypnotic glimmer of the meadow.

A hand snakes around his waist to flatten over his stomach. A figure of midnight green and black presses against his back like the forest’s living body.

“You like to live dangerously, don’t you, John Watson?” the familiar voice purrs in his ear and coils sweetly in his gut.

John blinks his eyes open to stare at the dark ceiling of his room at the bed & breakfast.

He feels ridiculous for how long it takes him to be sure it was a dream. He doesn’t have dreams that vivid, except about the war. Sherlock’s next to him, a pile of black curls sticking out of blankets, breaths soft and resonant in his long nose in his sleep. John turns his head to watch his chest rise and fall. What exactly has he signed on for?

They need to be up at 06:30 to catch the train back to London. John’s trying not to think about it, because all the conclusions he can to come to are insane. What’s he meant to do once he gets Sherlock home? How is he supposed to handle modern London if he could barely manage the excitement of a car?

It occurs to him, watching the shadows of tree branches move across the ceiling, that they could stay here. Somewhere like this, at least; a nice small town where Sherlock can acclimatize gradually. 

But the idea of _not_ having a sea of people and urban weirdness for Sherlock to blend into is terrifying. John’s got a feeling that nothing smaller than London would be big or strong enough to hold him. He’s so fucked, honestly. Why didn’t he think about this _before_ he took a fairy home with him?

He lies there for a long time, mind rattling with train schedules, training schedules, and dancing budgets, weighing the two of them crammed into a Camden bedsit vs. the likelihood of affording a larger flat. Eventually, he falls asleep to the music of another man’s breathing.

When John wakes in the morning, Sherlock’s sitting cross-legged in bed, watching him. John blinks, because it doesn’t feel the least bit strange. He looks up at Sherlock, who looks down at him, and the moment has all the solidity of a mundane event.

No, it _is_ a mundane event. All at once, an entire history of _them_ rolls out in John’s head. He _knows_ Sherlock. Sherlock plays violin in the middle of the night. He does chemistry in their kitchen. He wears unreasonably expensive suits to mucky crime scenes and _never_ fixes John coffee even though he’ll cook and sometimes make tea, and that one time after they were locked into a meat freezer, he made them both hot chocolate—and not with a mix, but the old-fashioned way. He never tidies, and he won’t do his own laundry, and he was a big fat liar when he claimed to have told John the worst about himself, but he tells John the most amazing stories about his cases and he is always, always, always there when John is alone and needs a friend.

John stares up at Sherlock, who sits watching him with his curly case of bedhead poking into his eyes, all long bare limbs in his shorts and a borrowed t-shirt. “Sherlock? How...?”

Sherlock grins at him, eyes glinting mischievously. 

John should be afraid. He should. He just got an entire life downloaded into his head and he’s pretty sure he should be hyperventilating, but all he can feel is _happy._ As though Sherlock has just gifted him with everything he ever wanted in life. 

That, somehow, is what scares him. He doesn’t have the first clue what to do with that.

Then his brain jumps tracks and he sits bolt upright. “Oh hell. Iron!” He turns to face Sherlock, who doesn’t so much as twitch, watching like he’s expecting John to do a trick at any moment. “Cold iron, Sherlock! Can’t it hurt you?”

One eyebrow goes up. “So you remember that, do you.”

That is not an answer. John stares relentlessly at him. Catching on that John will sit there till he says something, Sherlock admits with disturbing casualness, “Iron can kill me.”

The bottom drops out of John’s stomach. The train. How the hell is he supposed to make this work if he can’t even get Sherlock to London?

“Assuming someone stabs me to death with it,” Sherlock continues dryly. He was already meeting John’s eyes—reading John’s reactions, Sherlock’s mocking him, deliberately teasing him, and should that feel this warm and fond?—but his gaze turns a little more sardonic. “What exactly were you expecting?”

John opens his mouth to explain, and then sort of hangs there, because explaining about iron to a fairy seems, well, awkward.. “Um. It doesn’t... _do_ things?” The Watson eloquence. He has it in spades.

“I did touch the car last night, if you’ll recall.” Sherlock looks distinctly, humiliatingly amused. “Why? Are you planning on braining me with that flat iron serving as a door stop downstairs?” He slaps John’s sheet-covered leg. “You should get up or we’ll be late for the train. In which case I’d have to make you suffer, because I want to see it arrive. I’ve got a notion that they’re like dragons.”

“That’s not the least bit like a dragon,” Sherlock complains as the train comes to a hissing, squealing, shuddering halt before them.

John studies it with elaborate care. “I shouldn’t think so. Dragons have wings, for a start.”

Sherlock sniffs. “Only some of them.” He dodges John’s attempt to nudge him toward the rail car, trying to peer down at the undercarriage. “They’re all different. Very individual, dragons.”

“Right.” John purses his lips. “Good to know I’ve got an expert I can consult.” He catches Sherlock by the arm and tows him past the less-than-impressed conductor. The car is about half-full of passengers, mostly dozing at this time of morning. They move quietly through the aisle to an empty pair of seats, where John lets Sherlock take the one by the window. He’s got a premonition that Sherlock would end up clambering over top of him, if he didn’t.

“So what is the train like, then?” he murmurs once he’s tossed his bag into the luggage rack and sat down. “If it’s nothing like a dragon?”

Sherlock shakes his head. 

Under John’s repeated admonishments, Sherlock sits till the conductor has come by to collect their tickets, and then he’s up and moving, practically vibrating with his desire to explore the train. John finds he’s got his hands full with keeping Sherlock from pulling the emergency brake or the fire alarm, or getting into the intercom system.

They step into the vestibule between cars, and John nearly has a heart attack when Sherlock slews sideways to grab onto the handle of the exterior door and smush his face against the window. John takes a step, braced to haul his new friend back in from hurling himself to his death. But Sherlock just...stays there, for a good minute, before he finally turns around to fix John with a puzzled expression. “Your glass is very strange.” And then he’s sailing off through the door into the next train car, leaving John to stare helplessly at the nose-print he’s left smeared on the window.

In the next car, Sherlock pops open the sliding door to one of the powder rooms to start poking at everything he can find in there that’ll rattle. John stands outside the open door with his hand over his face, hoping vainly that no one will recognize him, or possibly that he’ll somehow manage to die on the spot. A woman holding the hand of a child who comes up to her waist stops about five feet away, glaring at him.

“I’m so sorry,” John mutters through his fingers. “He’s intolerable if I don’t let him explore. He’ll be out in just a second. _Won’t you, Sherlock._ ”

Sherlock reaches over his shoulder to flap his hand in John’s general direction. John can’t tell if he even noticed what John said. When he hears the _clack_ of the toilet seat, John grabs him by the coat tails and bodily drags him out. “Time to go back to our seats.”

John keeps close to Sherlock’s back as they make their way back, the better to steer him if he takes it into his head to dive into anything else. A few of the passengers they pass are riding with cats curled in their laps. Most of the cats seem to be dozing, but when Sherlock passes, every one of them lifts their head to follow his progress. It’s a bit spooky, the way John can turn back and see them all staring after him with knowing cat-eyes.

Sherlock stops by an older man with a fluffy, long-haired Siamese-looking cat on his lap. He locks gazes with the cat for a few seconds, and then Sherlock _yowls._

The sudden, horrific shriek strips about a decade off John’s life. All activity in the car stops. John tries to restart his heart and sink through the floor at the same time.

Looking terrified, the man holding the strangely pleased-looking cat opens his mouth, probably to call for help. John lunges forward to elbow Sherlock aside. “I am so sorry.” He grabs Sherlock’s elbow and begins pulling him away. “It’s fine, he’s harmless! Just his morning meds haven’t kicked in yet.”

Sherlock shakes him off a few strides later. “I was having a conversation, John!”

“Keep your voice down,” John hisses. It looked more like screaming to him, but he doggedly stays on topic. “You were _frightening the passengers._ ”

“The cat was fine!”

John only realizes how hard he’s gritting his teeth when they creak. “Not the cat, Sherlock.”

Suspicious glares follow them all the way back to their seats, where John all but shoves Sherlock into the one by the window. Sherlock doesn’t seem to care about the rough handling; he sets to examining all the things in this space, running his hands over the fabrics and metals, around the edges of the power point. Gratitude wells up in John that he thought to address the whole ‘not sticking your fingers in’ issue. “What is this made of?” Sherlock asks after a moment. “It’s not wood or metal or stone...”

It’s hard to switch gears from ‘frustrated panic’ to ‘teacher.’ “You know about bicycles but not plastic?”

He gets no response. Sherlock spends the next five blissfully quiet minutes apparently meditating, eyes closed and one finger absently stroking the power point.

John watches Sherlock think and wonders what’s wrong in his own head. Where’s his well-earned sense of caution? He’s got used to being a suspicious bastard, these days. He knows better than to let his guard down; life’s taught him to brace for the shite it flings. Hell, when he went out on the hunt with Bill’s mates, he got the jitters every time he had his back to them, his nape prickling with the awareness of their loaded guns where he couldn’t see them.

And Sherlock. Sherlock is _fae._ The Fair Folk lie. That’s what they do; they lie and they trick you and they take what they want and if they’re in a good mood they make you believe it was your idea to give it to them. He’s a living force of nature, unpredictable and barely governable, and John’s responsible for him. Sherlock’s climbed into his head and _rewritten his memories._ Shouldn’t he be afraid?

No, reword that. He _should_ be afraid. He should be sodding terrified. But Sherlock is incandescent with intellect. John can’t tell whether the light in those eerie eyes is his own fancy or if they actually glow sometimes, but when Sherlock gets going, his eyes turn the colour of lightning and his presence beats against John like a gathering storm, tingling over his skin and raising the hair on the backs of his arms. It feels like he’s just been raised from the dead. Like the first clean breath of air he’s drawn since Afghanistan. All John can do is revel in that thrill of amazement every time Sherlock says his name, or speaks, or looks at him.

The next thing he knows, John’s getting kicked awake from a dream by legs in his lap. Which is interesting, because Sherlock is also in his own seat. And also glued to the window, so engrossed in whatever he’s looking at that he’s flailing around like an octopus that’s fallen behind schedule.

What the fuck is even going through his head? John rubs his face and tries to shake himself free of the pieces of dream that insist on clinging to him. Long, strong fingers threading through his hair. He’d been purring in pleasure at the sensation; actually purring because, now he thinks of it, he’d been some sort of cat. A great cat, with a tawny, striped fur coat into which fingers had dug and rubbed. John can still feel the rumble of the purr in his throat. God, had he been doing that out loud?

Sherlock’s voice had been there, with the strange unearthly harmonics he’d had when he spoke in the barrow. The sounds of his voice hovers at the edge of memory, but John can’t fetch the words back.

“Your eyes are the same,” he says aloud, for no real reason other than that it’s true. 

Sherlock turns to look over his shoulder with a mischievous smile before he faces back to the window and points. “ _What_ is _that_?”

John leans forward to look. “That’s Birmingham.” Which is a stupid thing to say to a man who’s never seen—

“It’s a city,” Sherlock murmurs in a tone that sounds something like affront. Granted, if ever a city could offend on sight, that’d be Birmingham. But Sherlock looks a bit rattled, too. A little lost in his own head, if John’s honest, like he’s seeing something else. Or maybe another time. “Why would you do such a thing?”

John resists the impulse to bristle. The decisions of the collective human race aren’t on him. “I don’t know. Because we could, I suppose.” He regards the shifting skyline, tries to imagine how it must look to brand new eyes. “Skyscrapers are efficient. Build up instead of out, it uses less land. Keeps things closer together.”

Sherlock’s head shifts back and forth like a rubbernecking tourist. Which is precisely what he is, isn’t it? Is he offended? Does it look like some sort of technological abomination to him? What do fairy cities look like? “Do you have them?” John blurts out on the heels of that last thought, because if they do, it must be amazing.

Sherlock doesn’t answer till the skyline disappears behind the walls that enclose the tracks along the final approach. Then he turns back. John catches his breath, because Sherlock is _radiant._

“It’s magnificent,” Sherlock says, with as much intensity as if it’d been John’s idea. John smiles helplessly back.

They sit there for a few moments, the rattle and sway of the train car in the station tunnel filling the silence. John can’t begin to imagine what might be going through Sherlock’s head, but he feels vaguely like he ought to be starting a conversation or something.

Sherlock’s fingers tap at the armrest on his far side with a hypnotically gentle rhythm. After a bit, John remembers what he’d been curious about. “What were you doing with the power point earlier?”

Sherlock makes a noise of query, then glances at the little plastic plate on the wall. “It’s empty.”

“Yes?” He explained this last night, but then he’s dumped a lot of information on Sherlock in the past...twelve hours. Good god, he’s out of his mind, doing this. But he’s already made his decision, so he musters his explanation and starts again. “You plug things into it...”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Not like that. Look.” He reaches up to lay a hand on the headrest of John’s seat. “The last person who sat here was a woman in a blue skirt. She was on her way home from a weekend of cheating on her husband, with...oh, two other men.” His head tilts like a curious hawk’s. “No, no, one was another woman. How refreshing, you lot were so prudish last time I was here. Mine contained, sometime in the past week, a bicycle racer who’d just returned from India with a satchel of illicit drugs and a conviction that he was a famous poet in a past life. Entirely wrong of him; he was previously an accountant.”

“Um.” A response seems called for, but how exactly does one respond to that? “What?”

Sherlock hefts a sigh. “Things have _lives,_ John. They have histories, experiences, memories. The wood of the door on your room at the inn came, about two hundred years ago, from an oak tree that witnessed a bloody battle when it was alive. It held human bones wrapped in its roots, and took pride in its guardianship of their resting place. This, on the other hand...” He reaches over to tap the power point, brow furrowing. “It’s etched with fleeting contact of many human lives, but it knows barely anything about itself. It’s all but empty.”

John studies the thing, as though it might do something while he’s watching. Dear god, is everything like this for Sherlock? The whole world, clamouring its stories in his ears every time he brushes by? It’s...fantastic is such a stupidly obvious word. He’d call it impossible, if he hadn’t already invited impossibility to come live with him. As it is, he doesn’t know _what_ to call it. He’s having trouble even processing it.

“Would you like to see?” Sherlock asks.

John looks at him, wide-eyed. “You can show me?”

“I can if you want me to.” Sherlock’s lips quirk into a smirk that dares him to agree. “Interested?” 

It’d be stupid to say yes, wouldn’t it? Sherlock looks too enthusiastic, which never spells anything but trouble. Then again, his newly-acquired memories tell him it tends to pay off to say yes to Sherlock. John looks around the people in the carriage around him, licks his lips, and nods. He’s always rather been a fan of trouble. 

Sherlock leans over the armrest, long fingers slipping into the flap of John's jeans pocket and wriggling downward, prodding him in the hip as he tries to delve in; it's nearly impossible while John's seated. John twitches in surprise. "What are you...?" 

"Coins, John.”

Oh. Yes, that...no, that doesn’t make sense, exactly, but John lifts his hips anyway, and lets Sherlock’s fingers press in deeper. He tries not to shiver as they caress the inner crease of his thigh through the thin lining. Surely it’s not intentional; Sherlock’s just digging through the change at the bottom, and _why_ are they doing this exactly? He can feel every twitch of Sherlock’s finger and thumb as he pinches one and draws it out slowly, a streak of warmth lingering in his wake.

Sherlock turns the penny over in his fingers a couple of times, then lets it fall into his palm. “Touch it, and close your eyes.” John eyes him for a moment, still a little shell-shocked from the sudden groping, before he obeys. 

At first the only thing that happens is that the penny gets warm, caught between their palms. And then...

He wonders if he’s fallen asleep again. He can feel himself turning over and over again in warm fingers, the light gleaming off his raised edges. 

The music of a violin floating around him as he falls with a clunk onto felt; fingers snapping, flipping, he shines through the air and sees _her_ pull _him_ in for a kiss as John falls... Lying under resigned leaves. Flying, caught in a bird’s beak with a happy _ca-ca-caw_ sounding around him. The jostle and jingle of other coins around him: in the soft darkness of pockets and purses, the ceramic chill of piggy banks, the exposed brightness at the edge of a glass jar. Water and fabric and soap, sloshing back and forth, back and forth; and then tumbling, hot, around and around, clattering joyfully on the dryer's metal walls.

Dancing through fingers again. They stroke and spin and play with him, swift and graceful, and John’s never been able to dance so beautifully. He remembers a lot of skin, then; a lot of fingers, the shapes of fingerprints pressed into his surface. Twirling over knuckles, slipping secretly into and out of sleeves, appearing from behind children's ears to the chimes of their delighted giggles.

And then dropped into a sink and washed down a drain with the remains of a dinner, his smooth shiny surface nicked and marred by the blades of the grinder. It's only a moment, but John gasps with the pain and the grief of it, and has to put a hand to his own face to be certain he's not missing chunks of himself.

He’s in one piece, and the train and its noises are surrounding him again, but threads still catch at him: two warm, slightly sweaty palms, pressed together with him sandwiched in between. The metal of him heating with the heat of their bodies.

Their hands are clasped, settled on the armrest between them. The grinder; he vaguely remembers grabbing...but with his skin tingling under the intensity of Sherlock's eyes, some outlandish part of him doesn’t really want to let go. This is getting out of hand; he’s sitting with his fingers laced together with a man who just screamed at a cat. In public. He tugs half-heartedly, and Sherlock’s hand tightens for an instant before he releases him.

Sherlock’s hand slips back into his own pocket with the penny. John rubs the heels of his hands over his eyes. He’s not sure how to process what just happened. It feels like a dream, but...it feels like his dreams of Afghanistan. Things that are real; just not happening here.

Entirely unfazed for his part—and why should he be? he’s used to this—Sherlock goes back to poking, fiddling, and looking around. Needing a moment to be selfish, John ignores him till Sherlock’s sudden stillness catches his attention.

He comes out of himself, to find Sherlock staring out the window again, with something like horrified awe on his face. It doesn’t take being acquainted with him for months to know that that’s alarming. “Sherlock? What is it?”

But he knows, with one glance outside the window, because they’re almost home.

Sherlock’s head twitches toward him, but his eyes don’t move. “John...that’s London. What have you people done?!”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might notice that this is not the chapter that was here before. That is because I've replaced it.
> 
> You'll probably see it again, in bits here and there.

221B thrums through his body. It opens up to slot him into it like a missing piece. 

This feels like a dream; one of those where you go walking through your childhood home, only it’s a castle and always has been. An intuitive part of his mind understands it intimately, is already reaching out to embrace this place as home while another, more logical part is screaming and banging its fists off the walls.

Sherlock hangs up his coat on the hooks by the door; John knows just how high he needs to stretch to reach them. He watches Sherlock move through the space of their flat with the careless grace of familiarity, brushing lint off the back of the grey armchair, peeking out through the curtains at the street below, picking up a test tube of something that’s dried out and crystallised since they left on their little trip. A trip which, apparently, had nothing to do with Wales or barrows but is now why they were gone for a week.

“I told you to put that away before we left,” John tells him before he realizes he’s saying it.

Oh. He did. After the strop Sherlock threw the last time he left his chemistry kit out, John hadn’t wanted any part of another one, and he’d yelled... He slides down the wall to the floor, hands sealed in a prayer position around his nose and mouth in a vain attempt to block out the homey smell of old wood and chemical experiments.

“What happened to the building that was here before?” he asks through his fingers. It’s an appeal for reason, really.

Sherlock shrugs. “I imagine it wasn’t.”

Is this fear he can feel thrumming thrumming in his neck and pressing at his temples?

Sherlock spoke first when they climbed into the taxi, before John could even open his mouth. “221B Baker Street,” he’d said, and John’s breath stopped in his chest. For one glorious, impossible moment, he was twelve again and the story had him. 

He’d waited for the moment to shatter, but it didn’t. The cab pulled away from the curb with no protest from the driver, and John went very still, overcome with an instinct that something had just gone horribly wrong in a direction he couldn’t anticipate. When reality continued to refrain from crashing back into place, he’d leaned over to Sherlock.

“Sherlock.” He’d breathed in carefully, to make sure he didn’t get this wrong. “Sherlock, there isn’t actually any such place as 221B Baker Street. It’s not real. There’s not even a 221 Baker Street.” He’d meant to sound very calm, supernaturally calm even, but he’d heard a thread of something like horror quivering in his own voice.

Sherlock had smirked and patted him on the knee. “Trust me, John.”

John has a terrible feeling that he really, really shouldn’t.

He’s sitting in a building that doesn’t exist. In capital letters, it Doesn’t Exist. There are websites devoted to its non-existence. It _famously_ does not actually exist. For the first time, John feels real fear of what he’s brought into the world.

It isn’t possible. And yet, here’s Mrs Hudson, serving him tea.

“Here you are, John, dear.” A cup of tea and a saucer with three precariously balanced biscuits appear in front of John’s face. He reaches up to take them, and she smiles down at him, too used to them both to bother asking why he’s huddled on the floor. “I cleaned out the fridge while you boys were gone. It was starting to smell a bit off up here.”

Sherlock flops into the chair, looking fey and human at once with his curls bouncing jauntily, mismatched cup and saucer of steaming tea balanced in one hand and a biscuit of his own hanging out of his mouth. He meets John’s eyes around Mrs Hudson with a sly bounce of his eyebrows that makes John wonder what shows on his face.

Was she a person somewhere else before? Was she Eleanor Hudson, never married, secretary of the Women's Auxiliary in Gravesend, Kent until yesterday, when she was rewritten into another life? 

Did the story pop out into the real world, or has the real world turned into a story?

John could send him back, though. He could send him back, and maybe he should.

But he climbs up from the floor to the sofa, and Sherlock stretches out his legs and curls his toes into the thick old carpet, and John’s not sure if he can send him back. It’s only been a day, but John can already feel the call of months of history between them, and the life that’s so much more than he ever thought he’d have again.

When he slumps sideways, he can see a pair of his socks peeking out from under the cushions. It’d been raining, and when he’d got home he’d stripped them from his cold, wet feet and promptly forgotten to toss them in the hamper.

That’s John’s life, stuffed down into the couch cushions. He’s not in a story. Stories don’t include dirty wet socks stuffed into the couch. They don’t include solid, dirty, smelly old London, with its cement and car fumes and grit and rain, the abrasive clatter of humans and the thin wet scent of the Thames. A London that has changed somehow since John was away, shifted aside to make room for Sherlock Holmes.

Or maybe he was always here and John simply found him. He’s still wondering how it works when he drifts off.

_“Black suits you.”_

They dance together in tuxedos among the headstones. It's a full moon, and the graveyard is lit up like day, if daylight were white. One of them is dead, or was, but John can’t for the life of him tell who. He rests his hands in Sherlock’s while they waltz, and they’re both warm. No clues.

There’s a gramophone playing somewhere, and the music sounds like wind. Old music full of scratches, the kind where John keeps expecting it to resolve itself into a tune he knows, but it never quite does. Still, he can't stop listening for that note combination. He knows it has to be there, if he just listens long enough to the music in between the spaces. 

If he falters in the dance everything will end. He can feel the burden of it weighing at him, can feel the tiring effort of watching his feet as they spin and sway, but he’s not tired enough to stop. Or maybe he can’t. Maybe Sherlock and the dance and the music are feeding each other, and he’ll be trapped here under the hill for ages and ages while time falls to dust outside under the human sky. He can’t stop dancing, and the night will never end.

And why would it? When Sherlock’s smile is nearly as bright as the moon, and his hair as black as the sky, and the stars dazzle and feed John’s heart, and everything is as clear as it's ever, ever, been.

They’re gliding on glass, a mirror on the floor of a cool green forest. _What can you see? John, look._

He can see the torn pages of a book. He jolts with surprise. He expected the Holmes stories, but it’s not. It’s the _Brothers Grimm,_ at the bottom of the mirror. The book’s leaves are wet.

John wakes up, tangled in his own gingham sheets.

He’s not sure he’s actually woken up, at first, because the music hasn’t stopped. Then it resolves into the textured strains of a violin, filtered by walls to a reedy thinness. Sherlock.


End file.
